Do you have what it takes to be customer centric?

A customer centric business puts customers at the heart of its operation and provides a positive experience throughout the customer’s lifecycle. How do you turn yourself into a customer centric business and why would you want to in the first place?

Being customer centric involves much more than just offering a really good service. It’s about the different channels you use to support customer engagement. It’s about digital transformation, your track record and how you manage and use your data to stay ahead of the competition.

Here are 3 steps to help you drive your customer centric business with CRM:

1. Maximise your ability to find new opportunities

The key to attracting new customers is to market to the right prospects with the right products and services that specifically appeal to them. It’s not rocket science. However, it can sometimes be a little harder than it sounds. Attracting customers can be achieved with an effective CRM supported by good, well thought out business processes. This will ensure your data is managed and used effectively to enable you to drive your marketing and sales activities in the right way.

2. Add intelligence to the sales process

You can use CRM to support your sales process and involve all your stakeholders in the sales journey. It’s important you harness all of the internal intelligence and knowledge available to improve your win ratio and make a significant difference to the growth of your business. Your pipeline and sales forecasting data is valuable information but it needs to be visible and used collaboratively across the relevant teams in order to achieve your revenue goals.

3. Automate the retention of customers

It’s much easier to keep a customer than win a new one. A customer may stay with you for a whole host of reasons, not just because they get a good service. It is your business to know why they selected you in the first place, and what makes them stay. CRM helps manage the renewal cycle and automates the decision-making process where relevant, making it easier for customers to transact with you. Customers will often stay if the product or service is a good fit, and their ability to purchase is simplified, easily renewed and automated as much as possible. Using the data in your CRM to understand the motivations of your customers will enable you to improve how you retain business and transform you into a more customer centric organisation.

CRM is the backbone to customer centricity

Being customer centric is about knowing and understanding the changing needs of your customers and providing the right products and services in the most effective and engaging way. CRM is the backbone of this evolving process, giving you the ability to adapt and respond quickly. Having a customer centric experience will make them choose you and stay with you.

Your ability to digitally transform provides one of the biggest opportunities to shape your customer engagement model, and the ability to replicate it successfully again and again. A good CRM with equally good data supports your customer’s journey, helping you to prospect and ultimately win and retain new opportunities. It will help you re-apply what you do well and recycle that process giving you a sustainable business that is future-proofed and ready for significant growth.